This famous lagerstatte from southern Germany is an obvious choice for a “greatest fossil fauna” list because it is in these fine-grained limestones representing the deposits of an ancient lagoon that the fossils of Archaeopteryx were found.
Archaeopteryx was the first evidence for a link between birds and reptiles, and the discovery of the first specimen came only a few months after Charles Darwin published Origin of Species, in which he made the case for a common ancestry for all organisms.
One of Darwin’s most vexing problems was the apparent lack of the transitional forms between major groups that his theory predicted, and the discovery of Archaeopteryx was an answer to this dilemma.
The lagoon that preserved Archaeopteryx down to its feathers also preserved insects, crustaceans, and echinoderms in exquisite detail, and give us a glimpse into a 150-million-year-old nearshore ecosystem.
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